Cevdet Erek: Americas — Cevdet Erek

SculptureCenter presents the first solo exhibition in New York of artist and musician Cevdet Erek. Americas arranges five of Erek’s site-specific sonic works, developed in the last decade for Mexico City, Chicago, San Francisco, São Paulo, and the former US embassy in The Hague, alongside a new commission for SculptureCenter. Together, they shape a distributed system of sound, rhythm, and architecture.

Connecting to a specific geography’s material, social, and historical pulses to trace its ripple effects is a throughline in Erek’s practice, perceptible in the projects revisited for Americas. Some of his key methods of working with sculpture expand the medium’s static form. Immersive sonic installations distribute multiple frequencies that hold fragmentary chords, custom-built speakers amplify architectural features, and refashioned measuring rulers quantify and make physical beats of time. This intuitive sensibility will expand with his site-specific commission, which considers two possibly overlapping histories rooted in New York City: the emergence of heavy underground music in the 1980s and Sound/Art, a 1984 exhibition at SculptureCenter that contributed to the definition of sound art as a genre, curated by composer and sculptor William Hellermann.

As a teenager in Istanbul, the artist found a particularly formative connection to popular culture in the US through tapes, album covers, and imagery associated with heavy music, particularly thrash metal. The genre influenced the sound of Erek’s own experimental band, Nekropsi, as did its engagement with themes of warfare, environmental destruction, political manipulation, and alienation rarely undertaken in mainstream popular music. Ruminations on this encounter materialized through Thrash softly from afar (2019), composed of five directional speakers and commissioned for the exhibition Soft Power at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art. For Americas, the work will be reprised and set in dialogue with Erek’s new research into the parallel histories of sound art and thrash music.

Like an original track that can be bootlegged, reproduced, and reconfigured, Erek’s sonic installations are carefully tuned to their physical environment and yet remain translatable, variable, and expandable. Reworking and rechanneling the murmurs of his previous installations into a new compilation, Erek develops a rhythmic structure that synchronizes with the textures of SculptureCenter’s labyrinthine lower level.